Fool Video: Will eBay Sell?

Shares of eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) hit a new 52-week low this week after the company reported slowing growth. Can eBay fix itself with fixed-price listings? Will a competitor make a bid for eBay? What does the future hold for shareholders? In this installment of "Fool Video," Motley Fool contributor Tim Beyers gives his take on eBay and its chances in a competitive landscape that includes Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) , Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) , Overstock.com (Nasdaq: OSTK) , Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) , and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) .

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Ebay has alienated it's core "customers", yes, I'm talking about the sellers, not the buyers.

Ebay seems to believe the buyers are their direct customers, the confusion in the messages then give in announcements shows they've lost the focus entirely on who exactly their customers are.

Further, when you keep your customers (sellers) in constant flux with a never ending stream of serious changes to both the site and it's functionality as well as policies, it becomes impossible to try to change everything you do to create a listing.

Then add to the chaos that they have turned the table upside down and used it to crush the sellers with oppressive policy to harm buyers, you lose your customers (sellers).

Ebay has managed to push sellers toward the exit consistently since the first change of policy rolled out the first of February and it's been literally non stop since then.

Every seller has a saturation point of what they will try to 'work with' and ebay is crossing off many of those points with each additional change.

It is a hostile selling environment from both the standpoint of site use, cost and ebay has even managed to make it an open season on sellers by less than honorable 'buyers'.

It's cooked.

The third quarter, traditionally a slow time will bring even more downturn in ebay's core market.

As to the number of new customers? Ebay has been losing growth in a strong and steady decline for the last 9 quarters. This is nothing new.

And since ebay considers an "active user" anyone who so much has placed a single bid or listed a single item in the prior 12 months, how many of those "members" are really of any worth?

I reached my tipping point with ebay about 2 years ago when I found the Powersellersunite website and discovered the many alternative auction sites out there. You can only push the fees so far and demand will fall for your services or product, whether you have a monopoly in auctions or oil. Lowering the fees is a good step, however a lot of sellers will not be returning.

For years now we have made our living only selling on ebay. We pay them on time every month to use thier services. Now they have made it so hard for sellers. It seems to me that ebay thinks the buyers are more important then the sellers. Now if a buyer does wrong or is a scam artist, you can't even tell because sellers can not leave bad feedback to warn others. Some times you bump into some crazy bidders that no matter how hard you try you just can't make them happy. If you don't make bidders happy then you as a seller get kicked off ebay. It getting to be nerve racking don't knowing what day ebay will decide to cancel us and put us out of business. We need to now start looking for another option to make a living.